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Study online with La Trobe University through Open Universities Australia. Explore all degrees, subjects and short courses now.

Shakespeare Now

Shakespeare: Page, Stage and Screen

Australian Literature

Narrative Fiction

The Storytellers: Reading Fiction

Gothic Afterlives

American Literature

This subject offers you an introduction to the historical contexts and form of the gothic. Beginning with the key 18th century novels of Lewis and Radcliffe and ending with various 21st century incarnations of the gothic, you will explore the way in which key elements and conventions of the gothic (such as the uncanny, the vampire and the zombie, masculine and feminine gothic, and the monstrous) develop over the history of the genre. You will also explore some of the ways in which the gothic has been translated and adapted in popular culture, in television, and on film.This is a level 3 subject. Please consider the subject pre-requisites before enrolling. This subject includes live sessions with the expectation of student attendance and participation.

Reading The Gothic

Why and how should we study Shakespeare today? From Taylor Swift and Paul Kelly to Jeanette Winterson and Joel Cohen, the influence of Shakespeare on twenty-first century culture is profound. This subject confronts Shakespeare’s contemporary relevance, assessing the broad variety of ways we continue to read, use, interpret, and critique texts first written and performed over 400 years ago. We’ll engage with a wide selection of Shakespearean adaptations – such as scripts, songs, television, and film – and genres, including romance, comedy, tragedy, and history. Travelling back in time, we’ll situate some of Shakespeare’s original poems and plays in the vibrant cultural milieu in which they were initially produced and received, and explore the evolution of his modern reputation as a literary genius. We’ll use current critical approaches to early modern literature, incorporating studies of disability, race, gender and sexuality, to think critically about who Shakespeare was, and about the global phenomenon that is Shakespeare now.This is a level 3 subject. Please consider the subject pre-requisites before enrolling.

“Make it new” – during the early 20th century modernist writers produced some of the most innovative and exciting literary texts in English. We’ll examine just why modernists declared it was time to “make it new!” and rejected the certainty of tradition. We’ll read revolutionary modernist fictions and manifestos, sound poems, experimental plays and ground-breaking films. In this subject, we&#39;ll explore modernism as an umbrella term for a multitude of literary responses to modern life - varied, contradictory and contested - and introduce central concepts used in modernist studies. We&#39;ll move between centres of modernist writing, such as London, Zurich, Paris, Berlin and New York to encounter key literary figures and artistic groups who all tried to break new ground in different ways.We will examine questions surrounding the creative tensions between tradition and experiment, the &#39;difficulty&#39; of modernist writing, high- and middlebrow fiction, postcolonial perspectives, gender politics, our own academic practices and the literary canon. Throughout the subject, we will read modernist writing in the context of political &amp; cultural events, as well as contemporary developments in art, film and music. This is a level 3 subject. Please consider the subject pre-requisites before enrolling. This subject includes live sessions with the expectation of student attendance and participation.

Make It New - Literary Modernism

Critical theory is essential across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, and has generated powerful insights into literature, art, culture and society. But theory can also be difficult to understand and apply. It uses jargon and coded ways of talking; its methods can seem convoluted and opaque; its ideas are often contrary to common sense and even paradoxical. This subject equips students with the skills and knowledge necessary to understand and apply theory in their academic, critical and creative writing. It covers branches of theory that include literary theory, screen theory, the theory of art, media theory, and structuralist and postructuralist theories of language, culture and society. Students will learn where these theories come from, how they work and how to use them. Throughout, the emphasis falls on empowering students to engage with theoretical arguments effectively and to feel comfortable handling theoretical concepts.This is a level 3 subject. Please consider the subject pre-requisites before enrolling. This subject includes live sessions with the expectation of student attendance and participation.

Making Sense Of Theory

This subject is about the volatile relationship between the ever-shifting form of the novel and modernity. Beginning in the age of #booktok and Goodreads, students will explore how the 21st-century novel is shaped by larger questions about identity, belonging, the literary marketplace and the history of the novel itself. Working backwards through time to the novel-reading boom of the eighteenth century, we investigate how novels have been sites of experimentation and transformation from the genre&#39;s beginnings. Students will hone their skills in textual criticism, their understanding of literary history and theory, and their critical engagement with the role of historical, political and cultural context in making a novel&#39;s meaning. Students completing this subject will encounter a range of novels from a range of literary periods, and will develop an understanding of how the genre has mutated over time. By closely analysing how authors from different cultural moments have represented and changed the worlds they live in, this subject will enrich students&#39; understanding of how writing, critical reading and literary analysis are part of global citizenship.This is a level 2 subject. Please consider the subject pre-requisites before enrolling. This subject includes live sessions with the expectation of student attendance and participation.

The Incredible True Story of The Novel

This subject asks how writing has shaped relationships between &#39;culture&#39; and &#39;nature&#39; from the beginning of the Anthropocene in the late 1700s to the present. You will explore key literary scenes that have dramatically reimagined &#39;nature&#39;, &#39;the environment&#39;, and the future of life: from the poetry of untameable nature produced alongside the mass urbanisation of the Industrial Revolution; to the mode of ecological polemic that coincides with the rise of environmentalism as a political movement in the 1960s and 70s; to Indigenous story-telling as a caring for country through the violence of settler colonization; to writing in our present moment, with an awareness of what to many seems a foreshortened future. Literature has not always been a benign force in the relationships between people and the more-than-human world; what role does it have in understanding and storying the present and future of that relationship?This is a level 3 subject. Please consider the subject pre-requisites before enrolling. This subject includes live sessions with the expectation of student attendance and participation.

Writing, Culture and Ecology

Australian literature has been seen as interested in trying to locate a specifically Australian identity. In this subject we consider twentieth and twenty-first century Australian writing which is in some way concerned with identifying Australian place, nationality, character, and landscape through representations of the past and our contemporary world. We examine the various ways in which history and place is used to present or contest versions of Australia.This is a level 2 subject. Please consider the subject pre-requisites before enrolling. This subject includes live sessions with the expectation of student attendance and participation.

Unsettling Australian Literatures

Say ‘romantic’ and people generally think of love, intimacy and passion. Romance novels end happily ever after. Rom-coms tell the same story for laughs. But ‘romantic’ also has a special meaning in cultural history, where it names the revolution in literature and other artforms that took place in Europe around 1800—the time of the French Revolution, the industrial revolution, and the British colonisation of Australia. This subject examines novels, poetry, theatre, art and music from this turning point in world history together with more recent texts and other materials. It explores the romantic ideas and practices that emerged around 1800 to make literature and art the subject of a specifically modern passion. Students will recover the history behind what it means to love a poem, painting or song. And they will learn why the real romance in a romance novel is always the one between the reader and the text.This is a level 2 subject. Please consider the subject pre-requisites before enrolling. This subject includes live sessions with the expectation of student attendance and participation.

Romance And Romanticism

What do light and dark, pleasure and pain, life and death have to do with literature? This subject introduces key terms and concepts in literary studies through the lens of our desires and fears as they have shaped literature and culture for centuries. Since Scheherazade, stories have mediated between death and pleasure. This subject explores the ways humans have transformed questions of life and death into literature in different times &amp; places, genres &amp; literary styles. The readings will be accompanied and elucidated by a range of seminars, lecture materials and online forums.This is a level 1 subject. This subject includes live sessions with the expectation of student attendance and participation.

After Dark - An Introduction To Literary Studies

In this subject, you will undertake a close and scholarly analysis of fiction and creative non fiction. Reading across a range of genres in 20th and 21st century work, you will engage with texts to identify the stylistic and technical choices writers have made and to consider the effects of these both in the prescribed texts and how they can apply these in their own writing.This is a level 1 subject and includes live sessions with the expectation of student attendance and participation.

Reading for Writers

La Trobe University Literature Short courses | Open Universities Australia

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